Obscene $8M Politico Payoff
Obscene $8M Politico payout just one way feds reward
their lapdog media
Benjamin Weingarten, New York Post
As the federal government’s outrageous spending draws the Trump administration’s hugely deserved scrutiny, one of this week’s many scandals is that We the Taxpayers have been shelling out millions to buy bureaucrats subscriptions to left-leaning media sources.
Yet as offensive as these expenditures are — and as grotesque as is the appearance of government rewarding its friendly propagandists with our money — it’s just a footnote to a far graver and more consequential scandal: That the feds have showered incalculably greater benefits on de facto regime media outlets by seeking to systematically suppress conservative and independent competitors through the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
To be sure, it’s perverse that (per USASpending.gov), we’ve forked over $8.2 million over the last 12 months across a bevy of agencies — including for pricey premium subscription services — to Politico, the chosen conduit for the notorious letter from 51 former intelligence officials seeking to discredit The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story for the benefit of then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020.
Likewise the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year lavished on The New York Times, rewarded with a Pulitzer for unquestioningly printing the leaks and lies fed to it by government officials to spin up the Russiagate hoax .
Same goes for the Associated Press, which raked in more than $600,000 in taxpayer cash over the last year, and well over $10 million from 2021 onward.
Simply put, the American people should not be on the hook for news subscriptions to biased sources, or arguably to any sources at all.
For those in conservative and independent media, these payments to competitors just add insult to injury.
As has been revealed over the last eight years, the feds have leveraged the power of the government — and hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding — to pressure social-media companies to purge disfavored news and views, and crush the business models of the conservative and independent media companies producing them.
Seeking to cancel en masse competing media companies through censorship, shadow-banning and cutting off the ad revenue that is their lifeblood provided a benefit worth many multiples of the funds taxpayers have been doling out to favored media outlets.
The unspoken quid pro quo is that these outlets will faithfully attack conservative and independent media, serve as witting conduits for government officials to run information operations via leaks and lies and refuse to lay a glove on the political establishment that butters their bread.
On top of all that, for conservative and independent media outlets, sums like the $8 million Politico payout is the cherry on top of this broader government-media scandal.
Meanwhile, Americans are getting a window into USAID’s funding of media entities abroad, sometimes in service of regime-change efforts.
Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based non-governmental organization, reported that Congress allocated $268,376,000 for 2025 for “training … for 6,200 journalists, assist[ing] 707 non-state news outlets, and support[ing] 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media” to bolster “the free flow of information.”
Beyond the question of whether this work actually serves the national interest, the feds have lost the benefit of the doubt: We cannot assume that such initiatives are all above board, and neither wasteful nor potentially nefarious.
Stories like one recently reported by Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag in the Public substack is one reason they have lost our trust. They found that at least one purportedly independent but actually US government-funded and -directed outlet, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, created critical “research” that was cited in the so-called CIA whistleblower complaint used to generate the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
Sickeningly, it appears our own government used derogatory information generated from a putatively foreign outlet — one allegedly responsible for taking down political figures abroad — to try to topple a duly elected US president here at home.
The fact of the matter is the feds have in myriad ways been monkeying with our First Amendment through co-opting and colluding with friendly media that do its bidding in service of its power.
Trump started to right that wrong with his Day 1 executive order launching a missile at the Censorship-Industrial Complex, prohibiting the government from any further participation.
His orders to freeze the Politico funding, and on Thursday to cut “every single media contract,” represents the next leg of an effort to restore our freedom of speech by further separating the media and the state.
Benjamin Weingarten is a contributor at RealClearInvestigations.
